My quest to turn a first house into a cozy home.

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Jered put on Barefoot Contessa and went upstair to take a nice little afternoon nap. So, since both my guys are down for the moment, I figured I would show y’all another one of my recent projects!

Remember that gorg ceiling fan I showed you that plugged into the wall? The one in the front room? With the swag kit? It was terrible.

Turns out that there really isn’t an electrical box there (I don’t know why we thought there might be one). This means that until we have worked an electrician into our budget, we are stuck. Instead of taking it down, we have decided to leave the monster up for the sake of Caseybear in the hot Texas summer. I couldn’t just leave it looking like that though, so I reached out to my BFF. Rustoleum ORB spray paint.

A few coats later, and some switched out glass shades, and you MIGHT not be able to guess upon FIRST inspection at least that its like fifteen years old. It was a pretty straightforward DIY that didn’t really SAVE us a lot of $$ since ceiling fans are pretty cheap, but I really didn’t want to invest in a second wall plug-in fan.

DIY Old Ceiling Fan Refresh

First, before you try to refresh any old ceiling fan, MAKE SURE that the power at your breaker is switched off.

This is important if you don’t want to (maybe) die. Even though I was well aware that our fan was plugged into a power strip (that when unplugged could not POSSIBLY have any power in it), I was still scared during the wiring bits of this.

Next, unscrew and remove the fan blades. Then remove whatever housing and light kit you’re having to deal with, ours removed with just a few small screws.

When you get the housing for the light kit off, it will more than likely be hanging by some wires. unscrew the plastic caps the hold the wires together, and set them aside. Wrap all of your wire ends with electrical tape, so as not to get spray paint on them later. Stuff scrap paper or newspaper in any crevices you don’t want painted, so as not to get those electrical bits covered in paint. (If you do, you can use a pair of wire strippers to remove the ends and reveal a fresh connection.)

Remove whatever cage is around the base of the fan from your ceiling, and you should be left with a stub of a fixture. I taped and papered all around this thing so that my precious popcorn ceiling would not be compromised by ORB (what a shame that would be.) A few spritzes of spray paint should do.

MASTER TIP: Use a box or large piece of cardboard/styrofoam to hold behind the fixture while you are spraying to catch the excess paint. You don’t want to end up with speckled furniture or rugs.

Open your windows and let this dry.

Lay out all other visible pieces that you have removed and give them a few coats of ORB, letting dry in between.

Piece that franken-fan back together and enjoy that you have now marginally improved one part of your room. Lol. When reattaching wiring, remember righty-tighty lefty-loosey when swirling the wires back together. “Swirling” sounds pretty pro right? Im practically an electrician.

So it kind of seems like a lot of work, but I have enjoyed the improvement without any real cost until we can find a better way! I stole a better set of glass shades from another room that we barely use, but if you don’t have extra you can purchase them for not very much at any home improvement store!

Easy peasy.

Not too long ago we had our first experience with scraping popcorn ceilings. We are planning on accomplishing MOST of the scraping within the next year. PROGRESS ❤

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So the Holidays came and went and …. I am happy to say that after a TON of drama, we have settled into our new home! I did not want to start on the new house posts until we were actually sure that we would have one.. my bad guys -.-

I will spare you all the VERY gory details, since a post bitching about something that is (thankfully) in the past is only really interesting for .5 seconds. In a nutshell,

-We put an offer on the home and it was all good until the seller found out he had to track down a gazillion estranged family members to get permission to sell.. we pushed back closing.

-The seller tracked down said family members in record time and we were all set to close again pending a few signatures, when our lender “found out” at the last minute that a few months beforehand, FHA guidelines had changed, requiring borrowers to have been at their current place of employment for at least six months (I was at about 4 months employment at the time). We had to push the close date back another few months.

-On our way to closing last week we got a phone call saying that the Justice Department (responsible for getting closing papers to one of the seller’s estranged family members in PRISON in NEW YORK…LOL) had hung up on the title company when they called to find out why it was taking so long. We waited, and thankfully our lender and the title company were able to have us sign that day, we heard back Yesterday that the family member had signed and our loan had been funded. YAY.

SO we put in our offer in mid-late October 2013, we own our home in the very end of January 2014. Dayum! So happy it all worked out!

Now, I can share with you how happy we are to be here!

Drum roll please….

TA-DA! Yup, thats our first home. The home that we knew was ours all along. It put up a good fight, but we refused to give up and now it is ours. Thank you to everyone that got us were, we LOVE IT!

Now comes the fun stuff! I already have a qeue of projects that I have completed and photographed and am anxious to share!